Overview

This edited volume focuses on social welfare and medicine within the French Empire and brings together important currents in both imperial history and the history of medicine. The book covers a broad period from the ‘first colonial empires’ that existed prior to 1830, the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, and the ‘afterlives’ of colonial regimes in France and newly-independent states. Building on recent scholarship, this volume examines the extension of imperialism into the post-colonial period. The chapters examine a range of topics developing our understanding of the reasons why colonial states saw the family as a site for biopolitical intervention. The authors argue that experts built a racialised body of knowledge about colonial populations through census data and medical understandings of problems such as child mortality and infertility. They show that by analysing and compiling dataon fertility, population growth (or decline), and health, this fuelled interventions designed to ensure a stable workforce, and that protecting children and mothers, vaccinating vulnerable populations, and creating modern, sanitary housing were all initiatives also aimed at serving larger goals of preserving colonial rule. Finally, the book shows that social welfare projects during the French Empire reflected concerns about race, differential fertility, and migration that continued well after decolonisation.

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9783031260230

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Margaret Cook Andersen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the USA. As well as having published the book, Regeneration through Empire: Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (2015), she has written articles for a number of journals, including French Historical Studies; French Politics, Culture, and Society; the Journal of Contemporary History; French History; and the Journal of Family History. Melissa K. Byrnes is Professor of History at Southwestern University, in the USA. Her research focuses on migration, race, empire, activism, and human rights. In addition to publishing the book Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (2023), she has written articles for journals including Cold War History, French Politics, Culture & Society, French Cultural Studies, and French History and Civilization.

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